Losing labs to Hurricane Sandy and animal rights protestors

What do you do when a lifetime's worth of work vanishes in a matter of hours?

For better or worse, the biological research community has become heavily reliant upon an animal that most of us would try to kill if we found it in our homes: the mouse. Mice have lots of good points. There's about a century's worth of genetic research on it to draw upon, there are sophisticated tools for pursuing genetic studies, and it's relatively closely related to us. Results from mice often translate into knowledge of human disease.

The downsides? Time and money. It can take years to create a custom genetic strain, and years more to breed in additional mutations to perform genetic tests. Mice are expensive to keep, since they have to be housed in a way that meets federal and local laws and kept in a controlled, germ-free environment. So, for a senior researcher, the lab's mouse collection can represent a lifetime of work—and a huge investment of grant money and institutional support.

This week brings two tales of entire mouse collections completely wiped out in less than a day: one by a natural disaster, one by human stupidity.

Tales of loss

When Hurricane Sandy struck New York City, it left most of southern Manhattan without power as flood waters flowed through the periphery. NYU Medical Center, based on the East River, was hit by both. Gord Fishell runs a neuroscience lab there, and he had done all he could do to prepare. The lab mice had extra food and water, and Fishell made sure the refrigerators and freezers that held his supplies and samples were plugged in to emergency power. He went home to the suburbs to wait out the storm.

He describes the aftermath in a perspective piece in today's issue of Nature. After the storm hit, his lab members (most without heat or power at home) struggled in to the medical center and found it in chaos. The emergency generators of the building had failed in the flood, forcing them to move the fridges and freezers into an entirely different building, one that still had backup power. People carried dry ice and liquid nitrogen up blacked-out stairways to save the samples that couldn't be moved.

And the mice, kept in a basement facility, were dead. They drowned in the flood. Only a few on the top-most racks of shelves stayed above water, but these wouldn't be found for another week.

This week, across the Atlantic in Italy, a similar scene of devastation played out with an entirely different root cause. An animal rights group apparently managed to get a hold of a security card that granted them access to the University of Milan's animal facility. After chaining themselves to doors, the protesters demanded to leave with all the mice and rabbits housed in the facility.

Negotiators eventually talked them down to leaving with 100, but a number of those carry mutations that leave them immunocompromised or vulnerable to the outside environment. By "rescuing" them, the activists have almost certainly ensured their death. But that wasn't the biggest loss. While in the facility, the intruders moved cages around and swapped labels, ensuring that the researchers couldn't tell which animals were involved in what experiment. The animals may still be alive, but all the neuroscience research that was planned to be done with them won't be able to go forward.

Rebuilding

How do you take a lab, filled with people at various stages in their careers, and start from scratch? Fishell says many of his staff went elsewhere, finding collaborators willing to house them in labs that were studying related questions. Many of these were elsewhere in New York City, but some moved as far as California. During the course of his work, Fishell also sent some of his mouse strains out to other researchers (something that's required once you describe them in a publication). He ended up requesting his own mice back.

In other cases, he was able to request similar or identical strains that were made by someone else. Unfortunately, many of these were subject to patents. Fishell said he's had to sign off on more than 50 contracts to obtain these mice.

Meanwhile, as NYU rebuilds its facility (to be on the third floor now), there's a matter of finding appropriate housing for the mice. Again, most are going to facilities elsewhere in New York City, but some are being kept under contracts to specialized mouse breeders as far away as Maine.

Six months later, Fishell estimates he's back to about 35 percent of the mice he had before the flood. But not all of them are ready to be worked on, and the delay has allowed other labs to move ahead on projects that partially overlap his. So, while trying to rebuild, he's also had to retool a number of the grant proposals funded by the NIH, in recognition that the original projects will just never happen now.

If Fishell's experience is anything to go by, the Italian researchers are going to be facing a difficult few months. Their careers will suffer a hangover that may last years, all because some ill-informed individuals decided to "rescue" some mice to death.